Meny

Theme article

History of crime fiction

By: Johan Wopenka

Depending upon how one wishes to define the concept ‘crime fiction’, it is possible to trace its history and roots back in time. When Dorothy L. Sayers compiled her comprehensive three-volume anthology Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror (1928–34) she started with two stories from the Old Testament, and when Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee (alias Ellery Queen) wrote their fundamental The Detective Short Story : A Bibliography (1942), they listed eight Chinese collections of short stories which are believed to have been written down between 600 A.D. and 1800 A.D., some of them containing stories based on an older, oral tradition.

Further reading

Literary figure

Sam Spade

Gender: Male

Dashiell Hammett only wrote one novel and a few short stories about the American private detective Sam Spade. The Maltese Falcon, however, is a major classic and like some of his short stories it is the precursor of the hardboiled detective story. The cynical, tough and outright rude Spade and his personal habits are so often copied that they have become clichés.

Further reading